I was just pointed to an article in the San Jose Mercury News: University of California introduces a modern logo.
According to the Merc, the new logo “was quietly introduced last month.” The introduction was so quiet that this newspaper article was the first time most faculty had heard about it.
Now, I’ve felt for a while that the old Victorian logo was too fussy, but the new one is awful. Not only is the shape and color ugly, but the shading of the “c” makes it look like “California” is being erased from the University. Perhaps that is a deliberate message on the part of the “leaders” of the University, who are hell-bent on privatizing the whole thing and carving up the remains for their wealthy friends. It also looks like a lower-case “c”, further denigrating the role that California has in the University of California.
I only hope that like “new Coke” this logo is quickly recognized as a marketing disaster and that it disappears as quietly as it appeared.
I was not finding any mention of this new logo on an official UC web site, so I was wondering if the Mercury News article is a hoax, but a Google Image search revealed that a version of the logo is being used on the admissions site http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/ (at least without the awful yellow-on-sky-blue coloring, but still with California being erased. There is more information about the new logo at http://suckmypixels.com/ic-uc-we-all-c-for-california/
Protests by students and faculty about the ugly new logo imposed on them have already started: https://www.facebook.com/StopTheUCLogoChange



The petition protesting the new logo at http://www.change.org/petitions/university-of-california-stop-the-change-of-the-uc-logo has over 33,000 signatures.
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2012 December 9 @ 12:08 |
It looks as though the C has just been dropped into a fat test tube and is slowly dissolving in acid. Ew.
Oh, and that was one of the nicer interpretations I came up with. I could get much more Freudian.
Comment by HelenS — 2012 December 9 @ 12:13 |
I’ve also heard it compared to the “slow network, still loading” icon and to “flushing it down the toilet”.
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2012 December 9 @ 16:10 |
A couple more Internet memes for the new UC logo are at
http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2012/12/11/the-masses-fight-back-against-uc-logo-with-snarky-memes/
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2012 December 13 @ 08:42 |
A good comment I saw in the Sentinel comments, by “Metrognome”: “It’s the perfect logo for a colonoscopy clinic!”
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2012 December 10 @ 09:15 |
Someone posted a logo comparison on reddit http://i.imgur.com/sCUYw.jpg . I dont know if the poster was the “artist”.
Comment by Rasmus — 2012 December 10 @ 21:56 |
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